


Burn the Maps and Watch Me Run

by theradiointukyshead



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Academy Era, F/M, ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-06
Updated: 2015-02-06
Packaged: 2018-03-10 12:29:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3290375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theradiointukyshead/pseuds/theradiointukyshead
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They fell seamlessly into each other’s life; being neighbors with your lab partner had that sort of effect. Fitz wasn’t sure if his crush on Simmons had dissipated yet, but it sure as hell was tucked far, far away in some deep dark part of his brain. Between her impressive and quite frankly encyclopedic knowledge of biochemistry, and her use of it to constantly one-up him in chem lab, his hormones were getting a bit confused.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Burn the Maps and Watch Me Run

**Author's Note:**

> Or 4 times Fitz uses his downstairs neighbor’s Wi-Fi printer, and 1 time he doesn’t intend to.

They say that the older you get, the more disillusioned you become with reality, the more nostalgia taints your memories in its rosy glaze. There are certain objects that sit idly somewhere in the back of your mind, collecting dust from one untouched year to the next, but its weight on your head is a comfort, its constant presence a distilled cluster of moments from days long gone. It’s there, it’s yours, and it keeps you alive.

For Fitz, it’s a Wi-Fi printer that he remembers from his Academy days with inexplicable fondness. What he would give for its sputtered whirring, its unreliable toner, its jammed pages. What he would give to get back his ink-stained afternoons, carefree laughter filtering through the blinds like the temperate sun at dusk.

What he would give to return to how things were before.

i.

It was 4 a.m., he had just finished a caffeine-and-self-hatred-induced paper, and he was borderline  _murderous_. Of course, it also happened to be one of those days when the whole universe conspired against him, because the paper was due first thing in the morning, and the only printer available on campus at this wee hour was broken. Apparently some freshmen had stuffed peanut butter in the cartridge during their catharsis.

So now Fitz was in his shoebox apartment, smashing the keyboard of his laptop in his sleep-deprived frustration.

It was then that he accidentally discovered his downstairs neighbor had a Wi-Fi printer, and she just so happened to be Jemma Simmons – the girl from chem lab who had been his source of distress ever since the school year began.

He had this rather embarrassingly elaborate plan on how to strike up a conversation with her, was ready to implement it when he could summon enough courage from his scrawny little being (which would be soon, or so he swore on deep-fried Mars bars and haggis). Showing up at her front door at 4 in the morning, looking like he needed a blood sacrifice and maybe a nap, was – to put it nicely – a little less than ideal.

The universe really did hate him today.

He stumbled over his words for an explanation, and she listened in her night shorts and crumpled shirt, nodding from time to time, though it was clear her mind was still asleep, and –  _is that drool?_   _Oh God that is drool._

They were, each of them, a different kind of mess.

“So please, can you let me use your printer?” he finished, not bothering to mask his desperation now.

“Huh? Oh –” she jolted awake and wiped away the offending evidence of her half-deadness – “Sorry. Yeah sure, help yourself out.”

The printer groaned like Smaug being disrupted of his sleep as it boosted up. He feigned interest in watching it throw up pages after pages as if the mechanism was so fascinating, his back to her; there was no way he could look at her now, complete loserface that he was.  

Her door clicked shut after his quiet “thank you.” He mulled over the train-wreck that was his first impression the entire way back. Downstairs, there was a really loud “Goddamn it Jemma Simmons!” groan coming from the other side of the door.

When they got randomly assigned as partners in lab the next day, they pretended like the night before had ceased to exist.

ii.

Halfway through the semester working together, they fell seamlessly into each other’s life; being neighbors with your lab partner had that sort of effect. Fitz wasn’t sure if his crush on Simmons had dissipated yet, but it sure as hell was tucked far, far away in some deep dark part of his brain. Between her impressive and quite frankly encyclopedic knowledge of biochemistry, and her use of it to constantly one-up him in chem lab, his hormones were getting a bit confused.

It was, at best, a love-hate relationship, if he had to put a label on it. He liked to think that most of the time it was love (or some semblance of it). They were light incarnate, electric field and magnetic field self-propagating across space indefinitely. They complemented each other like it was –  _because_  it was – the law of nature, ingrained in every light photon since the beginning of time itself.

Of course, for every action there was an equal and opposite reaction, and there were times they were ready to lunge at each other’s throat because of the tiniest thing.

Her slasher movie playing on high volume at ungodly hours, for example.

He grumbled and shoved his face into a pillow to muffle a string of colorful British obscenities. His tolerance was high tonight since he knew she had just finished a tough midterm and could use a good detox, but there was only so much a sleep-deprived man could take.

One more high-pitched scream set to a cheap Psycho score rip-off, and he shot upright. Too lazy to actually go downstairs and give her an earful, he instead reached for his laptop and hacked into her Wi-Fi network with surprising ease. Her printer sputtered to life and coughed out the first message.

_Spoiler alert: Bruce Willis is a ghost all along._

His phone flashed her number immediately afterwards.

_“What the hell, Fitz?”_

“I have access to your printer,” said he, in a monotone that implied he meant business. “Each time I can hear your film from my flat, I will send a spoiler for a cinematic masterpiece to your printer.”

She completely ignored him. “ _The password. How do you know my Wi-Fi password_?”

He broke character for a moment to scoff, “the hint is ‘The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything.’ Honestly Jemma, it wasn’t that hard to guess.”

She groaned. Then the line went dead.

Fitz snickered and fell back to bed. He wasn’t even finished pulling the cover up when another overly dramatic scream pierced the air.

Another message was printed within a minute:  _Spoiler alert: Guy Pearce killed his wife._

There was an agonized “no” coming from below. He picked up his phone with a smirk.

“ _God damn it Fitz I haven’t seen_ Memento _.”_

“I’m aware of that,” he lavished each word with sadistic satisfaction. “I also know you’ve been meaning to watch  _A Beautiful Mind_.”

_“Don’t you dare!”_ she all but snarled.

In one breath, the words came rushing out, “TheGeniusHallucinatesHisFriends.”

_“I wish I could punch you in your face right now.”_

“Do whatever you want to me tomorrow, I don’t care, but for now please button it so I can sleep.”

And, like all things said at the threshold of consciousness, it was a statement he regretted making, because as soon as they sat down in lab, she proceeded to systematically spoil every Classic Who series finale for him.

Like he had said, they wanted to rip each other’s throat out sometimes.

iii.

The grudging partnership, however, ended up doing wonders to their friendship and their grades. The semester ended with two perfect 4.0 GPAs. Simmons showed up at his place in the evening while he was still playing Xbox in his boxers, his face covered in stubble and Cheetos dust, hell-bent on dragging him to the Boiler Room.

“Jemma, you know it is uncharacteristic of me to get shitfaced,” he whined.

“It is also uncharacteristic of you to ace Biochem, but here we are,” she retorted. Squatting in front of the couch and blocking his view, she grabbed the controller from him. “Come on Fitz. This is a cause for celebration.”

She looked up with those imploring eyes, those damn brown eyes that looked like hot chocolate on a winter night when you wanted to curl up by the fireplace, and a piece of Cheetos that he had been balancing between his lips dropped unceremoniously to the floor.

God he was so whipped.

Four hours later, when his sentences began to morph into an incomprehensible Play-Doh blob, he found her by the bar chatting with a bartender who was positively GQ material. Some generic house music was blasting from the speakers. He staggered forward to its thumping bass and dropped to the seat next to hers. Throwing one arm over her shoulders, he shot the bartender a look the shape of a thousand flying bullets. Fitz was half the guy’s size, but bartenders knew better than to piss off a potentially generous tipper, so he backed off anyway.

“Hi,” he said. There was a shit-eating grin plastered across his face. She responded with an amused smirk. “DoYouKnow –” there was a pause as he hiccupped “– WhatIHaveAlwaysWanted?”

“What?” she yelled over the club’s cacophony. “I can’t hear you.”

“DO YOU KNOW WHAT I HAVE ALWAYS WANTED?”

She shook her head.

“LET’S GO BACK TO YOUR PLACE AND I CAN SHOW YOU.”

Half of the bar whipped their heads round to stare at him in disgust. Simmons looked like she was about to choke on her own spit. Unfortunately, with his sensibility drowning in alcohol, Fitz was oblivious to the rest of the world. He simply waved his phone in front of her, “look, I found this thing on the internet, and I just wanna try it out.”

Simmons took one look at the screen, arched an eyebrow at him, and tugged him by his loosen tie out of the Boiler Room without a word.

The first rays of sunlight had already gilded her room and they were still sprawled on the floor, surrounded by blank paper and adhesive sheets, watching and re-watching YouTube tutorials on how to make temporary tattoos from a printer.

“No Fitz, you are a grown man, you do not walk around with a bloody Primeape tattoo on your bicep!” Her eyes rolled so far back they disappeared in another dimension.

“But it’s a Pokemon  _and_  it’s a monkey,” he reasoned. “Plus it’s in black and white. Can’t get any artsier than that.”

She crumpled up a piece of paper and hurled it at him. It bounced off his face. He scrunched up his nose, “fine, if I can’t get my Primeape on my arm then you can’t get your name in Circular Gallifreyan behind your ear.”

“But we’re using  _my_  printer. We play by  _my_  rule.”

“But I’m the one who came up with the idea.”

And they fought and fought. Eventually it was Simmons, who was slightly hungover and a whole lot frustrated, that put an end to things.

“How about this?” she rubbed her temples and put a finger up to shush his rambling. “Since we’re responsible adults who work in an academic environment, I think our tattoos should relate to science.”

He muttered something about her being fun at parties, but even when every cell in his body was inebriated, he could never say no to her, so they spent the next thirty minutes picking their respective science-y tattoos. 

For the next two weeks, she went about her life with “no energy in the universe is created” etched on her left collarbone, while he had “and none is destroyed” on his right.

His friends frowned and said that it was a boring choice, that he lacked taste, that physics was a dry subject, but he thought behind physics’ rigid laws and cold harsh facts hid a beauty that trickled into every single crack of his soul.

iv.

It was during midterm week of the spring semester when Simmons’ Neuroscience professor was shot right in front of her, in the middle of their discussion. It took SHIELD less than two hours to catch the sniper, who committed suicide rather than give away the name of his employer, but none of that mattered to her, not with the blood splattered on her shirt and dripping down her shaky fingers.

Fitz let her sob into his chest that night, sitting on her kitchen floor, his hand gripping her shuddering frame so tight like planets in orbit clinging on to each other. The tears only dampened his shirt, but her pain drenched his entire being.

“I couldn’t save her,” she choked out, the syllables strangled and hoarse. “She was dying in front of me and I couldn’t save her.”

“Jemma, the bullet went straight through her heart,” he pulled back to look at her. “You did everything you could.”

They stayed unmoving like that for a while, her crumbling completely and him muttering “it’s okay” into her hair over and over like a mantra. In the end, when she had calmed down enough, his thumb wiped away the last of her tears. Tucking her head in the crook of his neck, he began, “let’s skip classes tomorrow. Let’s go on a road trip somewhere. Anywhere. Let’s leave it all behind, just for one day.”

“But you have an exam tomorrow.”

“That can be easily taken care of,” he grinned. “I just need your printer for a sec.”

He forged a doctor’s note – as it turned out, he was surprisingly excellent at faking signatures – and they took off running as soon as he dropped the note off in his professor’s office in the morning.

“You carry around fake doctor’s note templates?” she raised an eyebrow, scandalized, when they finally merged into the highway.

He merely grinned and threw a smug glance at her. She sat cross-legged in the passenger’s seat, her hair tangling with the wind from their rolled-down window, amber sunlight flecking each strand with a warmth that was both an invitation and a comfort, like a familiar airport terminal, like the skyline of a city you never missed until you left it behind. Instinctively, he reached over and curled his fingers around hers.

About an hour in, he cranked up the radio and left it on some classics channel. Simmons – being more of a shamelessly-in-love-with-trashy-top-40-songs kind of person – complained loudly, but Fitz had a thing for driver-picks-the-music rule, so she gruffly crossed her arms while he belted out song after song with his dying whale voice.

“ _I would walk 500 miles and I would walk 500 more_ ,” he grated, tapping the steering wheel, smiling so widely it was strange how his face hadn’t cracked in half. 

She threw her hands up, “you Scots and your obsession with this god-awful song.”

Putting a hand over her mouth, he took a breath to brace himself for the last part, “ _just to be the man who walked a thousand miles to fall down at your doooooor_.”

She insisted on driving after she had been decidedly fed up with his singing. At first he gave her the silent treatment, choosing instead to sulk like a grumpy grandpa as she sang along to the top 40. But she was intoxicating and life was too short to pretend to hate mainstream music, and soon he found himself joining in.

“ _I’ll fix these broken things_ ,” she began.

“ _Repair your broken wings_ ,” he finished.

She counted to three with her fingers, and together they launched into a raucous chorus, “ _this love has taken its toll on me. She said goodbye too many times before_.”

The music drifted to the lulling melody of  _If I Ain’t Got You_. She turned the volume down until it was background noise, her grip on the steering wheel tightened. “Fitz,” she said, and the change in mood was almost palpable.

He hummed in response.

“What happened yesterday –”

“– wasn’t your fault, and won’t happen again,” he interrupted before she could finish.

“Will it? We’re graduating soon, Fitz. In a few months’ time we’re no longer cadets; we’ll be SHIELD agents. Our lives won’t be at risk,” she swallowed hard, “because our lives themselves  _are_  the risk.”

“I know, I’m terrified too. But changes are scary, and it’s okay to be afraid of them.”

“It’s not changes I’m afraid of,” she sighed. “It’s dying.”

It took Simmons a while to pull over, and when she finally did, her hands were trembling so hard Fitz had to unbuckle his seatbelt to reach out and clamp them down. “I know we’re not field agents and just scientists working at Sci-Ops,” she exhaled shakily, “but Professor Porter was one too and look what they did to her.”

“Look, I’m not gonna assure you that it’s all gonna be fine,” he confessed, in a tone so quiet it almost died amidst the roar of cars zooming past. “I really don’t know what’s ahead of us. Maybe we’ll invent a non-lethal weapon, because God knows how much you hate hurting people. Maybe we’ll find a cure for a deadly disease. Maybe we’ll do research or maybe we’ll end up teaching at the Academy for the rest of our lives. Maybe we’ll even go into the field a little, just to see what it’s like. But whatever is waiting for us, I can’t wait to see them, as long as you’re there along the way.”

She gave him a tentative smile and he hugged her tightly, consoles and seatbelts be damned. Past her shoulders, he could see traces of emerging spring, could smell it in the air, and it all felt like beginnings that stretched on endlessly, beckoning him forward.

v.

Following the acceptance into Sci-Ops, they had to terminate their leases and move to a new city. Simmons left her beat-up printer and some old furniture for the new tenant, but Fitz felt like she had left a part of them behind. The night before the moving truck came, they stayed up until three to toast this apartment building, sitting on his bare hardwood floor to sip wine from solo cups balanced on a cardboard box. She got strangely nostalgic when she was tipsy, a trait he found endearing but also very melancholic; it reminded him of the frailty that came with growing up.

“And that right there,” she motioned with her cup to a charred patch on the living room wall, “is the result of an exploding cartridge. Good thing you didn’t pack much gun powder in it, right Fitz?”

He nodded drowsily as she continued to recite the mishap behind each deformity, listening to the music of her tone rather than the sense of her words.  

“Remember when you died in Call of Duty and threw your controller at the wall so hard it chipped off the paint?”

“Remember when you spilled coffee all over the carpet because it was your fifth cup that night and your hands were shaking?”

_Remember when you met me and finally understood that midnight was also a feeling, finally yearned for warmth on the other side of your bed? I came into your life and now you find cursive lines from a long poem hidden between strings of number._

His stream of thought jarred him awake. It was nearly dawn. He – having fallen asleep on the floor – had a blanket and pillows piled both on top and underneath him, while she was curled up on the empty inflatable mattress. Warmth tingled every part of him, and he pressed a kiss of gratitude on the papery skin of her cheek.

The urge to stand on the fire escape and scream her name was making his fingers twitch. He grabbed his laptop and began typing, because he sucked at communicating his feelings but goddamn it that didn’t mean he wasn’t trying his best to express them. In front of the screen’s lurid glow, long-overdue words came tumbling out like a torrent finally breaking free of its concrete container. He felt light-headed as he clicked save, before closing his laptop with a sigh of relief and crawled onto the mattress, falling back to sleep by her side.

Except, he didn’t click save at all.

When they entered her apartment, ready to bring the boxes down to the truck, he was dismayed to find a physical copy of his note lying neatly in her printer’s tray. Apparently with half of his mind still in a dream, he had accidentally sent it to the printer through Wi-Fi instead of saving it.

_Shite_.

Fitz launched himself at the printer, hoping against hope that he got to it first before Simmons finished fumbling with the keys. When she turned around, he was panting, his hand still on the printer, but the offending paper had been shoved into his pocket.

“Are you alright, Fitz? You seem a bit pale,” she looked concerned.

“Yeah I’m okay. Just,” he bit his lips, staring at the printer, trying to spout an excuse as to why he was clinging on to it,  “are you sure you wanna leave it behind? After all, it’s how our story started.”

“It is,” she sighed wistfully. “But it belongs to an old chapter. You can’t finish the book if you keep re-reading previous pages. Don’t you worry though, we’ll keep printing our new chapters as we go along.”

“Yeah,” he grinned as he lifted a box and carried it towards the door. “Spoiler alert: they’re gonna be fantastic.”

vi.

On the other side of the lab, Simmons is going over Hydra research on the hard drive that Bobbi Morse recovered with some lower-level scientists. He drinks her in, all short hair and toned physique, plastic smile and calloused gaze. She is absinthe, part poison and part cure, and he tears his eyes away because it is too much.

Sharp edges prick his hand as he fishes a folded piece of paper out of his back pocket and smooths it out on the countertop. The words greet him in their unchanging earnest, black against a white background that has turned creamy with time.

_When you take Intro Physics they tell you that in the absence of air resistance, every falling object accelerates at a constant rate. I looked at you, that day when we were paired up for lab, your hand spelling out formulas on pages and splashing ink blots across my mind, and I wished the law of physics would still hold true for us. I wished – I still do – that you were falling just as fast as I was. Imagine how effortless it would be, just you and I, tumbling downward together from the same beginning to the same end._

_I’m not good with words, but what I’m trying to say is that I am free-falling in a vacuum – through coffee-scented sleepless nights neck-deep in schoolwork, through long drives with the radio blasting rubbish top 40 hits. I am falling – prayer on my tongue and hand on my heart – for you._

Over and over he wants to march up to her, read her the words from years long gone, tell her that they have never stopped being true, that he forgives her and begs for her forgiveness, that they are a mess but they can clean this up together. Over and over he chooses not to, because unlike pages from an inkjet printer, people are rarely black and white.

He folds the paper up and tucks it away.


End file.
